Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia

What a Difference a Region Makes

Chris Berry ,Nicola Liscutin ,Jonathan D. Mackintosh

Publication Year: 2009

Highlights how regional popular cultures and creative industries have become globally powerful, analyzing gender and labor issues amid differing regulatory frameworks of cultural production and piracy in Asia.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Note on Romanization

Where names have an established conventional spelling in English, we have retained the spelling. Otherwise, we have adopted standardized forms of romanization for all Asian languages that do not normally use Roman script.

Introduction

Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes is a collection of essays about the discipline of Cultural Studies and its use to analyze the cultural industries in Northeast Asia. It opens with a section considering the discipline itself — perhaps even treating it as a kind of cultural industry in its own right. ...

I - Reflections on Cultural Studies in/on Northeast Asia

1 - Reconsidering East Asian Connectivity and the Usefulness of Media and Cultural Studies

I remember that, just before I presented this paper under its original title of
“On the Usefulness of Media and Cultural Studies” at the conference in London, a friend of mine said, “Okay, you are presenting a paper on the uselessness of media and cultural studies.” While this was his misreading of the title, I realized it sounded more provocative and perhaps more accurately suggested what I was trying to convey — something about an emergent uneasy sense of doing critical media and cultural studies — and which I am feeling. ...

I want to discuss the radical potential of an Asian Cultural Studies. But, before I can do that, I must firstly address another question. Can one really even speak of an “Asian Cultural Studies”? After all, between the two fields of Asian Area Studies and the parallel universe that is Postcolonialism, there appears to be little geographic or theoretical room to constitute such a field. ...

3 - How to Speak about Oneself: Theory and Identity in Taiwan

In the life of nations, people address themselves and their collective identity in historically specific and changing ways. There are styles and registers with which people talk about themselves as a coherent group. Identities are addressed with certain valorized narratives and themes and legitimized with epistemologies under which people know themselves, and know that the know themselves. ...

II - Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia

4 - Placing South Korean Cinema into the Pusan International Film Festival: Programming Strategy in the Global/Local Context

Since Venice under Mussolini, film festivals have played a significant role in introducing national film culture within a global exchange system. Enmeshed in a set of cultural politics aimed at promoting cultural diversity, they importantly help to brand films nationally and circulate them across the borders of the nation-state. ...

5 - Global America?American-Japanese Film Co-productions from Shogun (1980) to Lost in Translation (2003)

In their study of how Hollywood’s global domination works, Miller et al. argue that exploitation of the “New International Division of Cultural Labour” (NICL) through foreign location production is a key mechanism of its hegemony. According to Miller et al., “Hollywood is global, in that it sells its wares in every nation, through a global system of copyright, promotion and distribution that uses the NICL to minimise costs and maximise revenue.”3 ...

6 - In between the Values of the Global and the National: The Korean Animation Industry

Globalization is indeed on everybody’s lips and it may be the concept of our time, as quoted above. We are often told that the world is interconnected and operates interdependently in economic and political terms; technical developments have compressed time-distance,2 so that the shrinking world is described as a “global village.” Consequently, there is a myth-like belief that homogeneous global culture is emerging.3 ...

III - Discourse, Crossing Borders

7 - The Transgression of Sharing and Copying: Pirating Japanese Animation in China

Sharing and copying are two very fundamental human activities, but they face fierce opposition in today‘s knowledge economy, which is fueled by the privatization and the management of originality and creativity. In fact, the current knowledge economy exploits creativity not only as a commodity for profit but also as capital itself, making creativity, like labor and raw materials, a major factor in late-capitalist production. ...

8 - The East Asian Brandscape: Distribution of Japanese Brands in the Age of Globalization

For Marx, writing in the age of the manufacturing economy and imperialism, wealth appears as an immense accumulation of commodities.1 Yet in the age of the information economy and globalization, wealth appears as an immense accumulation of brands. There should be little doubt that global brands have become one of the most visible signs of globalization. ...

9 - Korean Pop Music in China: Nationalism, Authenticity, and Gender

Authenticity and nationality are closely linked for fans of South Korean1 popular culture in China, as well for the Korean cultural establishment. Bringing gender into the equation, in this essay I focus on the mainly young female fans of Korean boy bands and idols. It was in 2000 that South Korean pop music became fashionable in China, as part of a regional phenomenon commonly dubbed “Korean Wave” (Hanliu in Chinese, Hallyu in Korean,2 a pun on the meteorological homonym “cold current” ).3 ...

IV - Nationalism and Transnationalism: The Case of Korea and Japan

The year 2005 had been designated “Korea-Japan Friendship Year” by the Korean (ROK) and Japanese governments, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic ties between the two countries. Various joint events and economic, sports, and cultural exchanges were meant to put a positive spin on ROK-Japan relations, which had grown rather tense in the nineties. ...

11 - Melodrama, Exorcism, Mimicry: Japan and the Colonial Past in the New Korean Cinema

In his recent reassessment of Italian neo-realist cinema, Mark Shiel has recalled that “one of the presumptions of the national cinema approach is that while films make an interesting object of study in themselves, their ultimate utility lies in the ways they produce a ‘collective narrative’ of a people and a national culture.” ...

12 - Reconsidering Cultural Hybridities: Transnational Exchanges of Popular Music in between Korea and Japan

Cultural Studies faces a crisis in Japan. About ten years have passed since it was “imported” from the United Kingdom following two key events: Tokyo University’s 1996 international conference that included five pioneering British scholars, including Stuart Hall,1 and the publication by two leading academic journals, Shiso and Gendai Shiso, of a special issue on Cultural Studies. ...

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